Term · Cowboy Bebop
Bebop
The ship is a rusted fishing trawler, the show is named after it, and neither one is really about fish.
In Otakana the clue reads: The converted fishing ship the crew lives on
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Cowboy Bebop
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
The Bebop is a converted fishing vessel with a hangar for two small craft, a lounge nobody cleans, and a permanent shortage of fuel. Jet Black bought it and keeps it flying. Spike Spiegel lives on it and contributes nothing to maintenance. The kitchen usually holds bell peppers and no beef, which the crew mentions often enough that it works as a running joke about being broke.
Bebop is also a jazz style: fast tempos, difficult chord changes, small groups improvising at speed. Yoko Kanno and her band the Seatbelts scored the series in that register, and the episodes are called sessions rather than episodes. Shinichiro Watanabe built the show to sit inside its music, so naming the crew's home after a genre was not decoration.
Sunrise aired the series in 1998, first as a cut broadcast on TV Tokyo and then in full on the satellite channel WOWOW. Twenty six sessions, few long arcs, and mostly people chasing bounties they end up losing. The Bebop drifts between Mars, Ganymede and Callisto, and the show never explains its own economics, which is part of why the ship still looks lived in.
Spelling BEBOP
BEBOP is five letters with two B's and nothing doubled at the back. The Japanese is a good trap: ビバップ romanises as bibappu, with a doubled P that English never took. The word arrived from jazz, spelled the way American musicians spelled it in the 1940s, so the tiles want one P and one O.